The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])
I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
"I'm coding 10x faster"
"look at the output velocity per employee"
"we are producing much more (in China)"
"look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"
Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.
The outsourcing of manufacturing was largely influenced by the externality of environmental pollution. People wanted to live in clean habitats. We had rivers on fire for weeks, extinction of species, and horrible pollution causing cancer and birth defects. Giving "the commies" the dirty, dangerous jobs, and moving everyone up into middle management and white collar knowledge work was seen as an evolution of the economy.
The political move to put all of that death and destruction onto China, where environmental regulation is willfully ignored in the interest of economics, was a smart move on their end.
We lost so much intellectual knowledge and other "tribal" technology in these processes to this outsourcing, which is unfortunate. We're almost having to rebuild our manufacturing from first principles, which may not be a bad thing.
Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972. The China Shock began in 2000 after PNTR.
Avoiding environmental regulation was one reason to move factories to China, avoiding unions and high wages was another.
But the local communities weren't demanding that their factories be moved overseas so they could have a clean if impoverished towns. Your entire causality is completely backwards.
It isn't 100% causality, but it was definitely one of the ways it was sold to people through PR/propaganda.
Free trade / globalism was the larger "true" move, and yes getting away from unions and high wages to maximize profits was a big part.
Corporations made a change from valuing stakeholder value (employees, communities, customers, suppliers, the nation) to pure shareholder value (profits over everything else, despite the long term result that profits by any and all means hurts all stakeholders and eventually can cannibalize the company unless you have monopolistic moats).
I promise you the people in the towns where the factories were closing were 100% against it. And the corporations never tried to claim that "at least your town will be cleaner" probably because they were mostly leaving behind superfund sites they were trying to avoid cleaning up.
Was the New Yorker crowd clinking glasses together talking about how good it was to get the dirty steel mills out of the country? Sure maybe but this argument never resonated with anyone on the ground.
Were companies actively moving factories offshore so they could be dirtier because they didn't have to comply with American environmental laws? Absolutely.
NalNezumi · · focus · HN ↗
One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])
I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
"I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"
"we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"
Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.
[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
tylerjharden · · focus · HN ↗
The political move to put all of that death and destruction onto China, where environmental regulation is willfully ignored in the interest of economics, was a smart move on their end.
We lost so much intellectual knowledge and other "tribal" technology in these processes to this outsourcing, which is unfortunate. We're almost having to rebuild our manufacturing from first principles, which may not be a bad thing.
jordanb · · focus · HN ↗
Avoiding environmental regulation was one reason to move factories to China, avoiding unions and high wages was another.
But the local communities weren't demanding that their factories be moved overseas so they could have a clean if impoverished towns. Your entire causality is completely backwards.
tylerjharden · · focus · HN ↗
Free trade / globalism was the larger "true" move, and yes getting away from unions and high wages to maximize profits was a big part.
Corporations made a change from valuing stakeholder value (employees, communities, customers, suppliers, the nation) to pure shareholder value (profits over everything else, despite the long term result that profits by any and all means hurts all stakeholders and eventually can cannibalize the company unless you have monopolistic moats).
jordanb · · focus · HN ↗
Was the New Yorker crowd clinking glasses together talking about how good it was to get the dirty steel mills out of the country? Sure maybe but this argument never resonated with anyone on the ground.
Were companies actively moving factories offshore so they could be dirtier because they didn't have to comply with American environmental laws? Absolutely.